Saturday, May 23, 2009

These are tough times and when you read of someone who is doing well you want to cheer. Atlassian is a software company which just hit $100 million in revenues - which they posted on their blog. They also talk about the transition from a startup to a medium sized company. Below is a little excrept from their blog:

This growth has accelerated the shift from generalist to specialist. To name a few, we've added front-end developers to craft clean and cross-browser CSS and Javascript. The Design team creates mock-ups, UI components and does usability testing. Technical writers handle the documentation. We now have more development managers who don't code. We have a QA team. Performance engineering has created baseline tests for load and stress. Programme management serves as air traffic control around complex dependencies of product integration. We also ramped up other departments: Product managers consolidate product requirements; as the Support Diva describes, support engineers have become skilled at solving problems that once passed through to developers.

Sometime when you make the transition from a startup a company can loose the things that make it special. Atlassian talks about what it is doing to prevent that:

Although we sometimes refused to admit it, we had crossed the line to become a medium-sized software organisation. Soon we had seven products, and we were integrating them into a new product, JIRA Studio. We desperately needed to take the plunge. Yet the transition was full of risks. Early on, I created a "don't change" list of the good stuff we didn't want to break, around innovation, open communication and practices found in the values. Also since software developers are a sceptical bunch, each new specialist would need to win over a tough crowd.